Jacob Frese

Jacob Frese was a Finnish and Swedish poet who wrote in Swedish. Having fled the Russian occupation of his hometown Vyborg, he found work as a civil servant in Stockholm and lived most of his life in poverty. He suffered from an illness of the lungs, which influenced his poetry. His poetry has been described as "extremely rich" and Baroque and often had a religious coloring. He imitated a variety of styles and wrote hymns which became quite popular within the pietist religious movement. Largely forgotten for the rest of the eighteenth century, he was valued by some Romantic authors and received greater recognition after 1900.